No Arabic abstract
Simulating quantum mechanics is known to be a difficult computational problem, especially when dealing with large systems. However, this difficulty may be overcome by using some controllable quantum system to study another less controllable or accessible quantum system, i.e., quantum simulation. Quantum simulation promises to have applications in the study of many problems in, e.g., condensed-matter physics, high-energy physics, atomic physics, quantum chemistry and cosmology. Quantum simulation could be implemented using quantum computers, but also with simpler, analog devices that would require less control, and therefore, would be easier to construct. A number of quantum systems such as neutral atoms, ions, polar molecules, electrons in semiconductors, superconducting circuits, nuclear spins and photons have been proposed as quantum simulators. This review outlines the main theoretical and experimental aspects of quantum simulation and emphasizes some of the challenges and promises of this fast-growing field.
We discuss in detail the implementation of an open-system quantum simulator with Rydberg states of neutral atoms held in an optical lattice. Our scheme allows one to realize both coherent as well as dissipative dynamics of complex spin models involving many-body interactions and constraints. The central building block of the simulation scheme is constituted by a mesoscopic Rydberg gate that permits the entanglement of several atoms in an efficient, robust and quick protocol. In addition, optical pumping on ancillary atoms provides the dissipative ingredient for engineering the coupling between the system and a tailored environment. As an illustration, we discuss how the simulator enables the simulation of coherent evolution of quantum spin models such as the two-dimensional Heisenberg model and Kitaevs toric code, which involves four-body spin interactions. We moreover show that in principle also the simulation of lattice fermions can be achieved. As an example for controlled dissipative dynamics, we discuss ground state cooling of frustration-free spin Hamiltonians.
Digital quantum simulation is a promising application for quantum computers. Their free programmability provides the potential to simulate the unitary evolution of any many-body Hamiltonian with bounded spectrum by discretizing the time evolution operator through a sequence of elementary quantum gates, typically achieved using Trotterization. A fundamental challenge in this context originates from experimental imperfections for the involved quantum gates, which critically limits the number of attainable gates within a reasonable accuracy and therefore the achievable system sizes and simulation times. In this work, we introduce a reinforcement learning algorithm to systematically build optimized quantum circuits for digital quantum simulation upon imposing a strong constraint on the number of allowed quantum gates. With this we consistently obtain quantum circuits that reproduce physical observables with as little as three entangling gates for long times and large system sizes. As concrete examples we apply our formalism to a long range Ising chain and the lattice Schwinger model. Our method makes larger scale digital quantum simulation possible within the scope of current experimental technology.
The interplay of Anderson localisation and decoherence results in intricate dynamics but is notoriously difficult to simulate on classical computers. We develop the framework for a quantum simulation of such an open quantum system making use of time-varying randomised gradients, and show that even an implementation with limited experimental resources results in accurate simulations.
Gate-based quantum computers can in principle simulate the adiabatic dynamics of a large class of Hamiltonians. Here we consider the cyclic adiabatic evolution of a parameter in the Hamiltonian. We propose a quantum algorithm to estimate the Berry phase and use it to classify the topological order of both single-particle and interacting models, highlighting the differences between the two. This algorithm is immediately extensible to any interacting topological system. Our results evidence the potential of near-term quantum hardware for the topological classification of quantum matter.
We present an open-source software for the simulation of observables in nuclear magnetic/quadrupole resonance experiments (NMR/NQR) on solid-state samples, developed to assist experimental research in the design of new strategies for the investigation of quantum materials inspired by the early NMR/NQR quantum computation protocols. % The software is based on a quantum mechanical description of nuclear spin dynamics in NMR/NQR experiments and has been widely tested on both theoretical and experimental available results. Moreover, the structure of the software allows an easy generalization of basic experiments to more sophisticated ones, as it includes all the libraries required for the numerical simulation of generic spin systems. In order to make the program easily accessible to a large user base, we developed a user-friendly graphical interface and fully-detailed documentation. Lastly, we portray several examples of the execution of the code that demonstrate the potential of NMR/NQR for the scopes of quantum control and quantum information processing.